Good news was Kalb did have a dentist. Bad news was I killed him yesterday.

It wasn’t intentional. According to the bartender he saw me polish off my second bottle of whiskey and felt like his town drunkard title was being taken away from him. So he challenged me to a drinking contest. No wonder I wound up where I did.

Where I wound up was fifteen miles southeast of town, so it took me a while to get my bearings and backtrack. Apparently in my drunken state I thought it was wise to get a move on towards Bazroba. I couldn’t figure as to why. The note said the 15th, which was over a week away yet. I shook my head at the thought. The things I do when I’m drunk.

I made it into Kalb and hitched up at the front of the bar. The name of the place was The Old Oak, and it was built in that saloon style that’s popular out here in the Lowlands. I made my way inside and saw the same thing I remembered from the night previous. Dirty glassware, knotty pine bar, sawdust floors, a drunk slung over the table even though it couldn’t yet be noon. In other words, a shithole.

In other words, my kind of place.

The bartender was a big man. Barrel-chested as a butcher, but with a face kindly as a saint. He never looked up from his prepwork as I approached. “What can I get ya?” he muttered, as his knife chop-chopped a fruit I recognized, but hadn’t seen in a while. My mouth watered then and I thought of a shot of whiskey, but instead I found myself saying “what can you tell me about the man who gave me this?” and I slid one of the fifty notes out to him.

His knife stopped as he slowly raised his head. Recognition came over his face immediately as he saw me. “Aw hell. I thought we’d seen the last of you.” he muttered, partly to me, partly to himself.

“Sorry to disappoint,” I said.

“Just promise not to kill anybody today, alright?” he said to me. I looked back shocked, had I broken the oath?

His eyes scanned over me and he came to some sort of conclusion. “You don’t remember, do ya?” He chuckled softly and shook his head.

“Well, I can’t say as I’m surprised. I never seen a man drink pure alcohol until last night. Fair to say I’ll never see it again”

Then he told me about the dentist.

The dentist approached me while I was still playing at ace-high. The bartender couldn’t make out what he said to me, but apparently it was enough. I took my earnings and made my way to the bar with the man. I had laid out my money and said, “we’re gonna drink til this is all spent.” The bartender, whose name I learned, was Carsten, said he’d keep it behind the bar until we needed the money back. It was an amount that probably could’ve bought the contents of the shelves, along with most of the food in the back, so he was pretty confident there would be a fair bit left over by the time we were finished.

Carsten had given us a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. We had it polished off in five minutes. I was smiling at the dentist, which only served to infuriate him more. The dentist, who folks called Doc Keen, ordered another bottle, which took us a bit longer. Probably fifteen to twenty. Doc wanted another one, but I stopped him and asked Carsten if he had any Clavian spirit.

“I did too. Hard to get as all hell, but our vet seems to have a taste for it. She’s gonna be frosty that y’all finished off the last of her stash” Carsten explained. He paused here for a moment. “I can’t figure how y’all can drink that stuff. Tried a glass of it once and felt like I’d washed my mouth out with horse piss.”

I smiled. “A bit of an acquired taste” He shook his head as if trying to get that word to sink in somehow. “Ain’t gonna be nothin I ever ‘acquire;” Then he continued on.

The Doc seemed to have a fondness for the drink as well. We polished this bottle off about the same tempo as the last one. Doc was wobbly and messy. He slurred insults at me that I responded with more smiles, which in turn led to more insults. He stood up all at once, pointed a shaky finger at me and told me “you wait right here.”

A sad smile came over Carsten’s face as he relayed this to me. “I thought he was finished there. Headed home to sleep it off. If I knew about what he was gonna try next.” He paused, then shook it off. “Well, I suppose it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. That man was hard-headed as a Fornish ram. He just woulda taken you out of the bar somewhere to do it.”

When the Doc came back to the bar, somewhere in the region of thirty minutes later, he had his old beat up surgery bag. He pulled out a bottle of clear liquid and set it up on the table. “You&I” he slurred, “gonna ha’ a glass a this!”, then he poured it out in two equal measures.

“You gotta understand” Carsten said, “I had no idea what it was at the time, and the two of you were, well, probably the most entertaining thing this place seen a while.”

We had a little circle of people around us now, watching. Whispering. (“Wouldn’t have been surprised if some of em were betting,” said Carsten) The Doc stared me in the eye and took a draw. His face scrunched up and he exhaled loudly, ‘haaaaaaaahhh’, then slapped the bar. It was then that the rest of the drinks must’ve caught up. He turned his head and got sick all over a railwayman that had gathered in too close.

“Guess I win.” I said to myself, but loud enough the crowd could hear.

“Naw you aint drank any yet.” Someone shouted back.

Carsten stopped before describing it to me. “I’ve never seen the like before. You drank the glass in one swallow. Ya didn’t wince. Ya didn’t cry. It was like it was water to ya. The one odd thing you did though was you took your boots off. Which reminds me.” He reached behind the counter and placed my worn out boots on top. “Kept these for ya. I guess part of me did figure you’d be back sometime.”

I pulled them off the counter and hugged them to my chest. The man who made these boots for me was long dead, and they’d been resoled and stitched more than a few times. There wasn’t much I was sentimental for, but this was one of em. I was glad to have them back.

“They found Doc this morning. Dead as a stone. Sad business.”

“What about the bill,” I said, “You seemed to recognize it.”

“The fifty?” he said, “There was a man at the end of the bar, paid his tab with em. Smaller bills, mind. Looked like a soldier, but not for us, and not Grensch. Merc maybe?”

“Huh.” I said, then thought of something else “You said that money I gave you was way more than what I’d owe. Do you still have it?”

His gaze narrowed “I gave it back to you at the end of the night. You think I’d keep it? Huh” He shook his head again then turned his back on me.

I hadn’t meant it in that way, but I suppose what I meant didn’t matter. Carsten had run out of things to say to me. I was glad for the silence though. I walked over to the big wood burning stove in the corner and hung my socks to dry up. I’d be glad for the warmth later. Something made me pause though. It was that throb in my mouth.

“If the dentist is dead, how do I get a tooth pulled around here?” I asked

“Well. Suppose you gotta go introduce yourself to Mourie”

----

Mourie turned out to be the town vet. Now that the Doc was in his eternal resting place at the foot of the Second, it’d be her job to do the stuff she never trained for. She was short and wide, with streaked grey hair, and was currently yelling at a horse that wouldn’t settle down. I liked her pretty much off the hop.

“I heard you’re the new dentist?” I said to her. She sighed and shook her head as she pulled up the horse’s front hoof. “Yup” she confirmed, “and the new doctor and surgeon and barber and whatever else this damn town wants to put on my plate -- WHOA!” She said, hollering at the horse again. She looked up at me, trying to keep a grip on the horse’s leg, “You want me to root around in your mouth, you better help me with this mare.”

I walked over and held the foreleg steady as she inspected the hoof. “Ah shit.” Mourie said, resignedly. “She’s foundered. I told Bertram not to let her in that pasture. Go ahead and let it down.”

I let go of the leg, and the mare placed her foot down gingerly. “Can you fix her?” I asked.

“Well, I’m a horse doctor, not a farrier. ‘Cept I guess now that Doc’s dead I guess I’m that too,” she responded “probably be easier to put her down for Bertram, but that’s his choice.

“Godsdamn that Doc for getting himself killed” she said, and spit on the stable floor.

She looked up at me with a bit of a grin. “Tooth trouble, huh? That come from being Shadowmin?”

"I don’t know what you mean." I lied. It was an easy lie. I’d even told it to myself a few times.

She waved a hand at me, swatting my words away like they were a cloud of flies. "Oh please. I'm from Clavia. You're pretty much royalty out there. I've seen more statues of you than the King, Teacher, and we both know how much old Portez loves his statues." She definitely had me here, so I resigned and told her that, yes, it was a side effect of being Shadowmin.

One thing about the techniques is they allow you to live much longer than your average person. I reckoned my age to be around two-hundred sixteen, even though by all accounts I look to be in my late thirties. I’m stronger, can move faster than most people, and can heal from most things too. That healing is the problem.

My body regenerates through no conscious process. Whoever the Ancients were that made the Shadowmin technique, they figured out how to make the body slowly withdraw from the reserves to heal. I can push this a bit quicker if I need to, but it wears down my reserves fast. The slow heal is the safer bet. I figured they created it to get their troops back to fighting condition faster. If something goes wrong though– a bone not set right, a tendon torn off the bone, or, in this case, a broken tooth healing in crooked– it can do a lot more harm than good.

“You’re probably gonna have to cut the gumline” I told her, “and you’re gonna have to do it quick.”

She chuckled a bit, “I wasn’t always a vet you know. I was a field medic for the 11th. You’re not the first Crow I’ve fixed up.”

She pulled a battered field bag from a rickety pine shelf and pulled out some tools. Scalpel. Pliers. Gauze. And a bottle of some sort. “This is rombane. Found it was one of the only things that could knock one of you out. Course, those were all lesser Crows compared to you. The Teacher. First Shadowmin.”

That old nickname. How long had it been since I’d heard someone refer to me as The Teacher, or as the First? Decades for sure. Mourie knew more about me than I’d guessed.

“Only takes a drop or two of this to knock out a red bear, so I’d better triple that.”

She took a dropper and submerged it. “Keep it under your tongue.” she admonished me. Then, after I was dosed, she took me up to an old bed on the second floor. “It’s going to take about twenty minutes for that to kick in. Lay here til it does.”

I was already feeling a bit of warmth, and the bed felt amazing. The hangover that had been kicking my forehead in had dulled to a throb. My mouth was already starting to feel better. I was sure I’d be out sooner than she said

Then, as I was about to drop off a spark started to tickle my mind. Something she said turned that spark to an ember and I realized something about one of the words on the note. It felt important and I thought I should tell someone, but nobody was there and I felt myself drift to a dead sleep.